With just nine employees, only one of them a full-time programmer, tiny ZapTel raked in $3 million in revenue last year, selling a couple million minutes a month’s worth of prepaid phone cards from its Web-based store to customers all over the world. Tens of thousands of the cards go to support personnel from the Philippines and India who are stationed in Iraq, so they can call home, says CEO Ron Reimann. And since the cards are virtual, not physical, he doesn’t need to ship a thing.

With the help of a Web analytics program called Index Tools, Reimann can track prospective customers in real time as they search the store for the best phone rates on international calling, alerting him of the countries for which demand is greatest at any time. He also relies on a bundle of other technologies, many open source-based, to keep the store going. "I’m able to run my business from a boat on Lake Michigan," he says.

The open-source Asterisk VoIP virtual PBX software and Cisco VoIP phones keep his distributed customer support staff (located in four different states) connected. The CRM system runs on the open source-based Sugar CRM. And the e-commerce store was developed in Cold Fusion and hosted by Denver-based Paravance.